“No, Sonny,” he drawled gently, “never hed ter use it yet!”
“It looks very old. Have you had it long?”
“Jus’ ’bout thirty years, I reckon!”
“Oh! Seems a long time to carry a thing without using it!”
“Waal,” he answered half absently, “thet’s so. It’s a thing you don’t want orfen—but when you do, you want it derned bad!”
Rocky seemed to me to have stepped into our life out of the pages of Bret Harte. For me the glamour of romance was cast by the Master’s spell over all that world, and no doubt helped to make old Rocky something of a hero in the eyes of youth; but such help was of small account, for the cardinal fact was Rocky himself. He was a man.
There did not seem to be any known region of the earth where prospectors roam that he had not sampled, and yet whilst gleaning something from every land, his native flavour clung to him unchanged. He was silent by habit and impossible to draw; not helpful to those who looked for short cuts, yet kindly and patient with those who meant to try; he was not to be exploited, and had an illuminating instinct for what was not genuine. He had ‘no use for short weight’—and showed it!
I used to watch him in the circle round the fire at nights, his face grave, weather-stained and wrinkled, with clear grey eyes and long brown beard, slightly grizzled then—watch and wonder why Rocky, experienced, wise and steadfast, should—at sixty—be seeking still. Were the prizes so few in the prospector’s life? or was there something wanting in him too? Why had he not achieved success?
It was not so clear then that ideals differ. Rocky’s ideal was the life—not the escape from it. There was something—sentiment, imagination, poetry, call it what you will—that could make common success seem to him common indeed and cheap! To follow in a new rush, to reap where another had sown, had no charm for him. It may be that an inborn pride disliked it; but it seems more likely that it simply did not attract him. And if—as in the end I thought—Rocky had taken the world as it is and backed himself against it—living up to his ideal, playing a ‘lone hand’ and playing it fair in all conditions, treading the unbeaten tracks, finding his triumph in his work, always moving on and contented so to end: the crown, “He was a man!”—then surely Rocky’s had achieved success!
That is Rocky, as remembered now! A bit idealised? Perhaps so: but who can say! In truth he had his sides and the defects of his qualities, like every one else; and it was not every one who made a hero of him. Many left him respectfully alone; and something of their feeling came to me the first time I was with him, when a stupid chatterer talked and asked too much. He was not surly or taciturn, but I felt frozen through by a calm deadly unresponsiveness which anything with blood and brain should have shrunk under. The dull monotone, the ominous drawl, the steady something in his clear calm eyes which I cannot define, gave an almost corrosive effect to innocent words and a voice of lazy gentleness.